Field
The subject matter disclosed herein relates to a method, apparatus, and/or system for providing network-based measurements to user equipment, such as a mobile device, for positioning.
Information
User Plane (UP) positioning comprises Secure User Plane Location (SUPL) specifications produced by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA). UP positioning is not always dependent on an underlying Radio Access Network (RAN). User Equipment (UE) or a Mobile Station (MS) may communicate with a location server such as a SUPL Location Platform (SLP) via a data connection between the UE and the location server. The data connection may be supported by a serving wireless or wireline network including, for example, in the case of a wireless network, a RAN. Such a data connection may allow a location server to provide assistance data to a UE. Such assistance data may, for example, comprise Assisted-Global Navigation Satellite (A-GNSS) assistance data. A data connection may also allow the UE to report location measurements to the location server, such as A-GNSS pseudoranges, for server-based position calculation, e.g., a so-called UE-assisted mode. Assistance data may be collected by the location server via proprietary means, such as via a Wide Area Reference Network (WARN) for A-GNSS, or via an interface to the network Operation and Maintenance center (O&M), or via some other entity in a network which is capable of providing necessary assistance data to an SLP, such as, e.g., Base Station (BS) coordinates.
User Plane positioning solutions, such as SUPL, have been designed to work with any network technologies being used to provide network access and data transport. Therefore, User Plane positioning solutions may be independent of any particular access network, such as, for example, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), or Long Term Evolution (LTE), to name just a few examples. To enable access network independence for a UP location solution such as SUPL, for example, all measurements and information needed for position calculation of a terminal (e.g., a UE or MS) must be provided by the location server (e.g., SUPL Location Platform (SLP)) and/or by the terminal. User Plane positioning has been designed for UE centric location methods where no additional terminal specific measurements from the underlying access network (e.g. a RAN) are needed, such as A-GNSS based location methods. User plane positioning solutions such as SUPL may make use of measurements of a RAN (e.g., base stations and/or WiFi access points in the RAN) by the UE and are thus not always completely independent of a RAN. However, in a particular implementation, the solutions do not depend on measurements made by elements in the RAN of signals transmitted by the UE.
However, certain other positioning/location solutions may require measurements made at a base station or at other access points and nodes (e.g., Location Measurement Units (LMUs), WiFi Access Points, and so forth) within a RAN of signals transmitted by a UE. These other solutions may include so-called control plane solutions in which existing network interfaces and protocols are used to transfer control information and measurements. With a control plane location solution, measurements made of a target UE by network elements such as base stations, WiFi Access Points and LMUs are transferred to a location server for computation of the location of the UE. The measurements are not transferred to the UE and are thus not available to the UE to help the UE compute its own location—e.g., for UE-based mode operation with SUPL. As a result, User Plane positioning solutions such as SUPL cannot make use of network-based location technologies which require measurements performed within the access network. This may result in less accurate positioning and in some cases may result in an inability to obtain a location as, for example, when a UE is indoors and cannot measure a sufficient number of GNSS satellites and/or network base stations and WiFi access points to yield an accurate location estimate or any location estimate.